Liz Aggiss
Liz Aggiss is a British live artist, dance performer, choreographer and film maker. Her work is inspired by early 20th century Ausdruckstanz, in particular the Grotesque dance of Valeska Gert, and by British Music Hall and Variety acts such as the eccentric dance performers, Max Wall and Wilson, Keppel and Betty. She is often described as the 'grand dame of anarchic dance'.
From 1982 to 2003, Aggiss collaborated with the composer, writer and choreographer, Billy Cowie, making live shows and films under the name Divas Dance Theatre. After their partnership ended, due to artistic differences, she made a series of films and solo live works, Survival Tactics for the Anarchic Dancer, The English Channel, Slap and Tickle and Crone Alone.
From her earliest works, Aggiss has challenged conventional ideas of female sexuality and beauty and questioned 'the social mores that pigeon-hole women of all ages.' She describes her later live shows as a project to 'reclaim the stage space for the older woman.'
Aggiss is Emeritus Professor in Visual Performance at the University of Brighton, where she taught for many years, and an Honorary Doctor at the Universities of Gothenburg and Chichester.
Early years and training
Liz Aggiss was born in Nannygoats Commons, Dagenham, Essex and grew up in nearby Upminster, which she later described as 'a bleak English suburb during post war austerity. Where little children were seen and not heard.' Her love of music hall came from her grandmother, who used to sing to her a whole range of music hall songs: 'These were gifts. Through a kind of memory osmosis I have both fascination and knowledge of music hall....I also have a direct familial lineage to early music hall and performance in my great Auntie Flo aka Marjorie Irvine.'Aggiss's first experience of dance was in 1970, when she studied Rudolph von Laban's modern educational dance in the UK. After a teacher training course in Keele, she 'had various jobs teaching PE teachers how to teach dance.' In 1980, she went to New York to study contemporary dance. After a summer 'studio hopping' from Graham to Cunningham to whatever else she fancied' she found the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Theatre Lab, where she felt she belonged. Until 1982, Aggiss trained with the Lab's lead teacher, the German expressionist Hanya Holm, in New York and in Colorado Springs. Back in the UK, Aggiss studied eccentric dance with Joan and Barry Grantham, 'possibly the last remaining living link with the early twentieth century UK Music Hall and Variety world.'
On her return to the UK in 1982, Aggiss began to teach visual performance at the University of Brighton. Here she met the Scottish composer and writer Billy Cowie, a fellow teacher. They began working together in order to get the student dancers to collaborate with the musicians. 'When the dancers didn't know how to, Liz got up and showed them. Billy directed from the sidelines.' In their book, Anarchic Dance, Aggiss and Cowie described how they worked together: 'All our work is truly collaborative....After the first few productions, whichever of us was feeling most inspired would take up the choreographic baton and run with it until we were floored by the other's barbed, critical and caustic comments. Latterly we pragmatically sliced up the works into manageable chunks and negotiated who would do which aspects of the 'steps' as we like to call them. Strangely the Yin/Yang combination of Aggiss, the 'stand up dancer' who can actually perform the movements, and Cowie the 'armchair choreographer' who can only dream them, works surprisingly well.'
The Wild Wigglers
In 1982, Aggiss and Cowie created The Wild Wigglers, a cabaret act inspired by the punk pogo dance, Wilson, Keppel and Betty's Sand Dance and J.H.Stead, the jumping comedian. Three dancers, wearing spiralling yellow and black leotards and tall pointy hats, performed a twenty-minute set of short visually connected dances: 'These simple animated gestures – hopping, jumping, scuttling, rummaging, blobbing, slugging – were grasped and choreographically 'worried to death' in succinct three-minute visual performance wonders'. Two Wild Wiggler dances, Weird Wiggle and Hop on Pops, can be seen on YouTube.The Wigglers performed on the Saturday morning television show, No. 73, where they met The Stranglers, who booked them as a support act. This led to appearances in Wembley Arena, Oxford Apollo, Brighton Centre and Zenith Paris. J King in the Morning Star wondered 'whether or not all that hilarious jumping and swaying with feet tied together really qualifies as dance....It was certainly movement of a highly entertaining kind, to be remembered with gratitude by a critic so often threatened with drowning in a sea of self-indulgence, pretentiousness and insipidity.'
The original Wild Wigglers were Liz Aggiss, Ian Smith and Eva Zambicki. Later members were Jane Bassett, Neil Butler, Billy Cowie, Ralf Higgins, Simon Hedger and Patrick Lee. In 1999, Aggiss, Smith and Butler reunited to perform the act once more in Brighton's Zap club, where the Wigglers originally premiered.
Grotesque Dancer
In 1986, Brighton's Zap Arts commissioned Aggiss and Cowie to create a solo piece to be performed in the single arch of the Zap Club. The work Grotesque Dancer was inspired by Aggiss's discovery of Valeska Gert, the most extreme and subversive of the German expressionist dancers. Wearing the uniform of a German gymnast, Aggiss, in a single spotlight, performed a series of short expressionist vignettes accompanied by cabaret-style songs, instrumentals and poems.Grotesque Dancer provoked strong reactions from audiences and critics. Anne Nugent, in The Stage, wrote that the show presented a 'scenario which disgusted male critics but was greeted with warmth by women writers....Those with a theatre background derived something from it. Those with a dance background did not.' British dance critics, whose background was mostly in ballet, were unaware of the piece's roots in Ausdruckstanz, and described the work as a parody of the film Cabaret or 'a recreation of a Third Reich cabaret'. In Time Out, Alan Robertson wrote, 'Aggiss galumphs around as if she were a transvestite refugee from one of the nightclub routines in Cabaret.'
Only the German dance historian Marion Kant recognised the inspiration: 'Liz Aggiss's performance startled me...because so little work has been done to recover grotesque dances and dancers....Yet suddenly...there she was, Liz Aggiss dancing grotesque; dancing Weimar Germany...turning herself into one of those unforgettable, striking images; sharp and penetrating, affronting the senses....There she was as a grotesque dancer reincarnated, offering an eccentric mixture of offence and nonsense.'
Aggiss later said that 'the work was about redefining beauty. By the end, the front row of the audience was crying, especially the women.' At one point, she whipped off her wig to reveal a shaven head. 'Amid gasps from the audience, she heard her father shout from the back row: 'Why do you have to make yourself so ugly?"
The show was reconstructed at the Purcell Room on London's South Bank, on 9 April 1999, with live musical accompaniment from Cowie and Gerard McChrystal.
Divas
In 1986, Aggiss and Cowie created a dance company, Divas, originally all women without formal dance training. Aggiss later said, 'We were always interested in working with performers with personality. In our auditions we interviewed people to find out what they were like. That was what came out on stage. In our first performance, one dancer was pregnant. If you wore glasses normally, you wore them on stage as well.' For dancers, the Divas had what critics described as 'non-standard bodies', causing Aggiss to ask, 'But what is a standard body?'Divas' first piece wasTorei en Vern Veta Arnold!, which premiered at the Chisenhale Dance Space London on 4 October 1986. In the show, eight dancers, in suits and high heels, used pedestrian, habitual and repetitive gestures. Looking back in 1993, Sophie Constanti described Divas as a 'crew of besuited, stiletto wearing Brighton women, whose otherwise unconventional appearance was intensified by the scowling, hard-edge non-conformity of Aggiss's brand of movement theatre.' Constanti also reviewed the show at the time: 'Jaunty, hypnotic, silently provocative and defiant, Divas are a refreshing assault on mainstream dance.'
Like Grotesque Dancer, Divas drew a hostile reaction from mainstream dance critics. John Percival in The Times, wrote, 'Liz Aggiss...has thought up a perfectly ripping wheeze of getting five of her chums...to perform in a group called Divas. They have already mastered – no that is too sexist a word for a group of young ladies – they have acquired such advanced performance skills as walking on and off stage.' Mary Clarke in The Guardian described the performers as 'determinedly ugly in dress and in movement...as untrained as they are unattractive.'
Die Orchidee im Plastik Karton
In 1988, Aggiss and Cowie created Die Orchidee im Plastik Karton, premiered by 13 dance students at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education, and later performed by Divas, at the Zap in 1989. It took the form of a German language lesson, in which gender-based phrases, spoken by a sampled female voice, revealed sexism in the language and the patriarchal nature of the culture. The phrases included 'InterCity is the train for men,' and 'The orchid in the plastic carton is the flower for ladies' Julia Pascal in her Guardian review wrote that 'Movement is staccato, grotesque and funny. Dann Geht sie Einkaufen – Hausfrau und Mutter is a woman in a crab position walking backwards and forwards on palms and feet; the endless repetitive work action delivered dead pan was answered with female laughs of recognition.'In the original student production the dancers wore the white vests and black knickers of school gym classes. In the second production, by Divas, they were dressed in red lederhosen. Parts of Die Orchidee appeared in a 1989 corporate film about Canon photocopiers, co-starring Rik Mayall in green lederhosen. In 1990, the Divas show toured to Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, where a reviewer wrote that 'Liz Aggiss, the post modern primadonna from Brighton puts her finger exactly on the nerve of the spirit of the times with her androgynous show Die Orchidee a send up of the rigid thoroughness of German bourgeois values.' The piece was reconstructed in 1999 at the Purcell Room London, with four male dancers and Aggiss, as school 'mistress', in power suit, stockings and stilettos, carrying a cane.